One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire ...

Last week, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a popular math professor at the University of New Hampshire, stunned the world of pure mathematics when he announced that he had proven the “bounded gaps” conjecture ...

On its surface, the Kakeya conjecture is a simple statement about rotating needles. But it underlies a wealth of mathematics. In mathematics, a simple problem is often not what it seems. Earlier this ...

If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read ...